PERRY CO ELEMENT SERIES

A large number of early studies produced prior to the 1970s, heavily influenced by 'traditional' Sauerian concepts and methods, exhibited a preoccupation with rural areas and tended to focus on the assessment of changes in the cultural landscape associated with successive episodes of human settlement. North American geographers have had a longstanding interest in documenting and analyzing the spatial patterns and processes associated with the settlement of the continent by a variety of population groups. At the same time, however, individual decisions and actions at the local level resulted in modifications to the national PLSS ideal that reflected individual and local needs, desires and practices involving land subdivision on the nineteenth-century Ohio frontier.

As such, we argue that the federal government was an influential 'author' of this cultural landscape, at least with respect to the alienation of public lands, through national scale policies that shaped land tenure and subdivision patterns and processes. The results of this study show that federal regulations on size, shape, and locations of purchases fashioned a characteristic settlement landscape that reflects the expression of national discourses materialized through tangible landscape elements such as roads and property lines, many of which persist in the present-day landscape. In order to more fully understand frontier settlement and land tenure processes during the Federal era, this study combines a close examination of issued land patents with field surveys of cultural landscapes in Perry County, Ohio, one of the earliest regions disposed of under the PLSS. The efficient and rapid disposal of land within the public domain to private hands under the auspices of the PLSS produced a landscape that represents the materialization not only of emerging national tropes regarding the commodification of land, but individual decisions which were both constrained and empowered by federal land policy as well. The central institution produced by these acts, the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), reflects these discourses. Viewed within the context of Richard Schein's work on 'materialized discourses' in the cultural landscape, this paper argues that embodied in these statutes were a number of national discourses reflecting the commodification of land and the expression of federal authority on the expanding western frontier.

PERRY CO ELEMENT SERIES

Beginning in the mid-1780s, the American federal government passed a series of laws that regulated the sale of public land to private citizens.

Perry co element